Excelsior: Journals of the Hutchinson Family Singers, 1842-1846

The Hutchinson Family Singers were a most important part
of American popular music's nascency. Their careers stretched
from the formative years in the early 1840s nearly to the end
of the nineteenth century, when popular music had become
a mature, specialized industry. In more ways than perhaps
any others of the day, the Hutchinsons borrowed from the
range of American musical experience to fashion a product
that engaged the minds and imaginations of the millions, an
audience of politicians, preachers, poets, and, most importantly, the common people. Whether as a result of agreeing
with their message, disagreeing, sharing a common heritage,
appreciating their uncommon manner of expression, or simply
living in a world they gave special definition, the story of the
Hutchinsons is some part of the stories of nearly all mid- nineteenth-century Americans.

These journals chronicle those musicians from the first of
their major tours in 1842 to their grandest, the visit to Great
Britain in 1846, and trace their careers from aspiring anonymity
to international renown. The pages are filled with travel,
music, and a rise to fame, but also more: opinions, insights,
hopes, defeats, victories, interesting personalities, and many-
sided human relationships. Taken together they represent a
source perhaps unique to nineteenth-century American
musical history: no other such record left us by musicians of
equivalent stature comes to hand. Further, the sort of richly-
detailed documentation of life in general found here (family
matters, the cost of things, travel, entertainment, food, reading
matter) projects these pages beyond the concern of only
American music students to include the social and cultural
historian. And given the Hutchinsons' involvement in many

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